Sparts Need Attention Again

LONDON – The Spartacist League of Britain, the Trotskyite sect that everybody loves to hate, feel that they haven’t united the entire global left in condemnation of them enough lately, and have decided to weigh in on what they call “the so-called ‘Coronavirus'”.

Claiming that COVID-19 “is obviously not real”, the purposefully provocative piece in Workers Hammer cast doubt on almost every single claim since the outbreak, laying out an elaborate conspiracy by which China have agreed to go along with the conspiracy in exchange for an increase in USAID, Korea being fooled by reports from China and the puppet regime in the occupied south of the country, and various sections of the US ruling classes, who of course are pulling all the strings, are variously lying or telling the truth about what they do or don’t know, and to make a long story short, Herman Cain was assassinated because he learned the truth.

No word on why the lone truth-tellers of Workers Hammer don’t fear being targeted for their usual bravery in being the only ones to say whatever nonsense pops into their deluded Trotskyite heads.

The Sparts none the less emphasise their “critical support” for the “fake virus” on the grounds that this particular hoax “has none the less exposed deep contradictions in the ruling classes and is plunging capital into ever greater depths of crisis”, out of which “the revolutionary vanguard represented by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) can finally organise the working class for our long-planned first Trotskyist revolution”.

Trump’s “alleged” infection in particular is being held up as proof that the virus “cannot be genuine”, and therefore as a “warning to all of our many readers about the limitations in putting too much faith in fake bourgeois viruses to effect revolutionary change that only the working class can deliver”, on the grounds that “despite promises, this reformist ‘virus’ didn’t even kill the President of the United States”, a task which can only be completed “by a virus designed and spread by the class-conscious proletariat of the United States, organised and agitated under the leadership of our sister organisation and known virus experts, the Spartacist League of the US”.

As the entire world is rocked with the release of every single statement by any Trotskyite organisation, it comes as no surprise that responses were swift. Rivals in Trotskyism, the IMT, have released a statement of their own which the Sparts, for their part, have preemptively refused to read “as social distancing prevents us from using it as an excuse to show up and ruin one of their events”.

In said statement released on marxist.com and reprinted on all the other various similarly named IMT sources, it was emphasised that with over a million deaths worldwide COVID-19 need “do anything more to separate itself out from demonstrably false bourgeois propaganda, like Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or ‘the Big Bang’.”

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Feel Old Yet? Billie Eilish Wasn’t Even Born at Publication of Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise

BERLIN – With the release of US pop singer Billie Eilish’s new song (“No Time to Die”, the theme for the latest installment in the never-ending post-Cold War British intelligence services advert series), the young songsayer has been again courting controversy by not knowing things as she makes the rounds on the talk show circuits of European countries.

Having already alienated all the “Boomers” in the band’s native Netherlands due to her lack of familiarity with Van Halen, Eilish arrived in Germany this week only to find her knowledge of formal logic and philosophy under scrutiny in the homeland of Hegel:

“You haven’t read Die bewußte Anwendung der dialektischen Methode auf dem Niveau der Lehre von der Denkweise?” asked the incredulous Bremen-based late-night talk show host James Kümmel, in a clearly visible state of shock during Eilish’s appearance on the former’s Thursday night show.

“I’ve never even heard of it!” laughed the singer, to gasps from the audience.

“It’s a classic short work by the Maoist theoretician Stefan Engel, of the MLPD. How old are you?” asked Kümmel, checking his notes.

“I was born in 2001, I’m 18!” laughed Eilish. “The only Maoist I read is JMP!”

“Oh God, you’re younger than the text! I feel so old! Don’t you feel extremely old, folks?” asked Kümmel to the audience, who laughed uproariously, but in that German way, where you have to stop chuckling every few seconds to say “ja, natürlich”.

Other public appearances by Eilish were marked by a similar culture clash between the Land of No Theory and the Land of The Appropriate Amount of Theory. During a daytime performance on Friday, Eilish made a joking reference to the synthesiser on stage as being “constructed through the Hegelian dialectic by attaching an antithesiser to a thesiser”, provoking a heckler to begin shouting: “that’s Fichte! Stop attributing Fichtean logic to Hegel, Yanks!” over and over again until they were escorted from the premises by security.

Eilish’s young age and theoretical naïveté leave her particularly vulnerable to ontological bullying in a country where every secondary school student is required to write a philosophically grounded defence of the rational core of Christianity or similarly grounded criticism of one of the same to be allowed to graduate. Outside of a scheduled performance in Hamburg this weekend, a picket is to take place by an LGBT+ group  who condemn Eilish’s discography for “failure to meaningfully engage with Hocquenghem’s central claims”. In solidarity, local Worker’s Spatula cadres will be joining the picket and passing out literature condemning Leon Trotsky.

Eilish’s management company, The Darkroom, have released a statement attempting to calm German outrage at the singer:

To the German press and public opinion,

Although we understand that it is not the case in Germany, in most cultures, youth is a time of impetuousness and irreverence towards authority and tradition. Billie Eilish can hardly be blamed for her ignorance, an understandable consequence of coming from the most anti-intellectual country on Earth and being born into a generation where hope is a fast-dying flame which we ourselves are extinguishing by profiting off of the despairing alienation which her entire generation is slowly resigning itself to.

We wish to assure the German public that Billie Eilish means no offence by not having an opinion on Kant’s religiosity, or the causes of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, or what a “World War II” is. She is simply too young in our culture to know things, and frankly, if it is up to us and all other gatekeepers of socially normative “alternative” culture, no young people would ever know a single new thing not necessary for commodity production and exchange.

However, as sale of Billie Eilish’s music is especially important in our digital era, it is very important to us that Billie Eilish know harmless things which will allow German people to purchase the alienated product of her labour and the labour of all those involved in the production of her music in its objectified commodity form.

Accordingly, we promise that throughout 2020, she and her brother and musical partner Finneas will sit down together to read Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, so that she can do rudimentary interviews for German television in the manner you people expect.

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First Foreign Production of Hamilton a Hit

ANTAKYA, PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF HATAY – The atmosphere was tense at the sell-out premiere tonight of the first-ever foreign production of the Broadway hit Hamilton in Antakya in southern Turkey (more specifically in the de facto independent People’s Republic of Hatay). Worker’s Spatula’s local correspondent and TÖPG militant, [REDACTED], received a special invitation from director Cem Karagün to see how the magic was made:

WS: You must be very excited to have brought this musical to Turkey. What inspired you to do it?

CK: Well, after we heard it had played such an important role in taking down the Obama government, it was a natural next step to bring it here and see if it could do the same thing.

WS: I see. So how did you manage to get hold of the rights?

CK: Our next step was to ask our sister organisation in the US to help us out. They found out that one of the cleaners at the theatre was a member of a Trotskyite sect, but rather than have him ice-axed, they traded him a newspaper subscription for copies of the script and sheet music.

WS: And how have the people of Armutlu responded to the musical?

CK: We’ve had an overwhelming response, really. From the moment that Hamilton witnesses the glories of Castro’s revolution in Cuba as a child. to his shooting in the back by the imperialists during a kind of Communist version of the Sheikh Said rebellion, people are jumping out of their seats and ululating. Before you know it, they had stormed a nearby police station and were passing the weapons out to anyone who would take them – and this is just the first night.

WS: It’s fair to say you’ve made a few tweaks to adjust the musical to the local political culture?

CK: Well yes, of course. People here don’t really respond particularly well to extended discussions about constitutional matters, but they did appreciate the insistence that armed struggle and revolution were the solution to contemporary problems. So we adjusted it to focus on that point.

WS: Some here have found the inclusion of a rapping Asian-American Mahir Çayan to be controversial.

CK: That’s the best bit.

WS: Well, congratulations on your successful transfer of the musical, wishing you many successes!

CK: Long live the popular front and the revolution! Long live President Assad! Long live Hamilton!

Abbas on Tears at Peres Funeral: “He was my only friend”

OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM – Following controversy surrounding his controversial attendence of the funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres, Arab social media have had their worst suspicions confirmed upon discovering that Mahmoud Abbas even cried at the funeral of Shimon Peres, who, in addition to being responsible for countless crimes against the Palestinians and Lebanese, was also not above spilling the blood of his co-nationals, as he was the one who had Yitzhak Rabin assassinated.

We repeat: Shimon Peres had Yitzhak Rabin assassinated, and then presided over the conversion of the peace process into another means of normalising perpetual occupation.

“Did I cry at the Isra-EElee bresident’s funeral? Yes. Because Mr. Beres was my best friend. He was my only friend. Sometimes I would sit on the edge of my bed late at night and call him, and we would talk for hours about our hobes and dreams.

“We had so much in common. We both enjoyed the same brothels in Morocco, the same hotels in Dubai, the same big Machers we bit our tongues in front of, a similar battalion of lackeys who bit their tongues in front of us. It was lonely at the tob, but we had each other. Now I have no one. Even my family votes for Hamas behind my back.”

The PFLP have released their own statement in response to the latest chapter in the romance between Fatah and “liberal Zionism”:

“While the imperialist bourgeoisie joins the traitor Mahmoud Abbas in mourning the passing of Shimon Peres, we know that militant communists around the world stand in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people instead, and mourn all of our martyrs. Abbas can say that he lost his only friend, but we know that we still have a friend in Stefan Engel.

“Although this is a written statement, we wish to assure the reader that at this juncture Stefan Engel appeared in the room where it was being written and bumped fists with us.”

Ebert’s Skeleton Dug Up and Named Chair of Die Linke

BERLIN – In a shocking twist even by the standards of the ever-dynamic world of German left politics, Die Linke has elected to dig up the remains of Friedrich Ebert and name it chairman of their party.

Unsurprisingly, the move to replace Kipping and Riexinger with the skeleton of the man whose government was responsible for the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg of Karl Liebknecht has caused controversy inside the party and out. SPD has immediately filed a lawsuit demanding Ebert’s remains be turned over to them, “since he is definitely ours and we would’ve done this already if only we’d thought of it first.”

Riexinger, who has been demoted to co-assistant to Chairman Ebert along with Kipping, responded defiantly to the SPD’s attempts to take away Die Linke’s newest asset: “Friedrich Ebert does not belong to the SPD alone, but to all who still dream the beautiful second internationalist dream here in Germany. We are the genuine left in Germany, and the German left is Ebert, so Ebert is us. He is our heritage, he is our future.”

Kipping added: “SPD needs to give it up. We’ve had about enough. It’s not hard to see, the corpse is ours.”

A small speaker has been installed in what remains of Ebert’s mouth which plays a loud recording of the German national anthem whenever someone in the area is detected engaging in ultra-left shenanigans. The ultra-leftism is detected through a complex network of cameras and microphones which feed information into a computer in the cranial cavity about the presence of red flags other than Die Linke’s or phrases statistically associated with ICOR troublemaking. If Stefan Engel’s name is uttered in the skeleton’s presence, the anthem will play at top volume while a signal will be sent to the police, so that they may come immediately to restore good patriotic German order.

Die Linke higher-ups refer to it as “a miracle of German engineering.”

In response to polite requests from the stupid proletarian members near the bottom of the party structure for an explanation of this warm embrace of Ebert while Die Linke still makes use of symbolism paying tribute to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Kipping and Riexinger remained steadfast.

“If this is the only thing you find hypocritical about Die Linke policy, I’m not sure how qualified you are to speak about left politics either,” laughed Kipping. “I mean, where were we during negotiations with Greece? I’m really asking you, I was quite drunk for most of the negotiations, and I’m not sure what I got up to.”

Riexinger agreed: “Very, very drunk.”

“Anyone who’s been with us this long isn’t gonna go running off to join a proper communist party just because we ‘abandon’ Luxemburg now,” concluded Kipping. “And if they do, all the better. It’s because of troublemakers like that that we’ve got the Verfassungsschutz on our backs.”

The DKP reacted to the news with delight: “So if they’re appropriating Ebert now, does that mean we can have the Karl Liebknecht House and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation? Not that we’re going to support any adventurist nonsense like Luxemburg and Liebknecht did, but it’d be nice to have more name-brand recognition.”

Stefan Engel, chairman of the MLPD and one true king of Narnia, was arrested within hours of Die Linke’s press release for physically assaulting the Ebert skeleton, whose skull he broke to pieces before the police arrived.